XEDS Analysis of Thin-foil Specimens in AEM: Current Status and Developments
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Lehigh University
Abstract: Analytical electron microscopy (AEM) with an X-ray energy-dispersive spectrometry (XEDS) method is one of the most powerful approaches for materials characterization in the nanometer scale. This approach is further improved with the recent developments of aberration-correction technique, which can provide sub-nm incident probes with sufficient currents to generate efficient X-ray signals. In addition, new approaches such as spectrum imaging are available. In this manuscript, we describe (1) improvement of quantitative X-ray analysis, (2) applications of multivariate statistical analysis to spectrum image datasets to improve analytical sensitivities of limited signals and (3) atomic-level X-ray analysis using aberration-corrected instruments, mainly based on our recent research projects. Furthermore, the future trends on X-ray analysis in AEM are also discussed.
Key words: Quantitative X-ray analysis, ζ-factor method, spectrum imaging method, multivariate statistical analysis, aberration correction